Spirit Airlines went bankrupt and stopped flying on 2 May, and everything it owned went up for sale, down to its staff’s inboxes. In August, Google won the auction for them. It bid $10 million for roughly 100 million emails and 500 million Teams chat messages written by Spirit’s flight attendants, pilots and office workers, and will use them to train its AI. By our arithmetic, that is about 1.7 cents a message. The people who wrote them get none of the money, and no federal law gives them a say.
What’s in the data
Beyond the emails and chats, the sale includes 20.6 million shared work documents, a million timesheet records, payroll and pricing models, and 175,658 employee records going back to August 1986, according to court filings reviewed by Skift and Runtime Wire. The sale still needs the bankruptcy judge’s approval, and the hearing has been postponed five times.
Who else wanted it
Google was not the only buyer. Mercor, an AI data company, was the back-up bidder at $7.5 million. Micro1, which trains its own models on data it buys and sells to the big AI labs, offered $12.5 million after the deadline, and promised to leave out sensitive employment material and destroy the raw records once processed. Google kept the deal because the auction had already closed.
What’s protected, and what isn’t
Spirit kept its passengers out of the sale. Booking, refund, in-flight purchase and WiFi systems were removed, and the court’s privacy reviewer recommended approval on 5 October. Her review covered customers. It did not cover employees, and the sale terms say nothing about employee data. The flight attendants’ union says that is the wrong way round: the protections guard passengers, while what is actually being sold is the staff’s own messages.
Google says the question does not arise. Its statement to reporters:
“Google is not buying any personal information from Spirit.”
That sits beside payroll, a million timesheets and 175,658 employee records. Names are meant to be stripped out before the data changes hands, and Google has agreed never to intentionally identify anyone in it. That promise covers what Google sets out to do. It does not cover what an AI model trained on the messages works out by itself from what is left. Sara Nelson, president of the flight attendants’ union, called the trade “completely unregulated” and said identifying people from it is “very easy.”
Who gets paid
About 17,000 people lost their jobs when Spirit shut down, with about an hour’s warning. Spirit told staff there would be no severance and no continued health cover, and some say they are still owed final pay.
Others are paid. Days after the shutdown, Spirit asked the court for up to $10.7 million in bonuses for the 130 to 140 staff kept on to wind the company down, about $76,000 each. The top three executives would get separate payments tied to how much the asset sales raise, the data sale included. And Google’s $10 million goes first to the lenders who funded the bankruptcy. Workers owed wages beyond a set limit join the queue behind them, where creditors in a collapse this size usually get “pennies on the dollar”.
The people selling the inbox have a stake in its price. The people who wrote it have none.
What it sets up
Spirit is the biggest case of a trade that is already running. When a company dies, brokers sell its staff’s emails, chats and documents to AI developers. SimpleClosure, a startup that winds down failed companies, opened a marketplace for this in April and reported more than 150 deals by October. Its pitch to buyers promises that “Personal data, credentials, and other sensitive information are removed”. It does not mention asking the employees.
If the judge approves Spirit’s sale, it will have cleared with a privacy review that checked passengers and left employees out. The next bankrupt company will point to it.
Nobody asked Spirit’s workers, because their employer was dead.
Further Reading
- Spirit Airlines Case Update: The Data Sale Slips to November, Docket detail on bids, de-identification terms, the ombudsman’s review and objectors.
- Fighting Spirit’s Data Sale to Google: Court Filings Show the List Getting Longer, Skift on payroll and employee records, the pilots’ safety-reporting warning and Springshot’s claim.
- AI Companies Really, Really Want to Buy Your Work Files and Emails, WIRED’s Steven Levy on cold pitches, the Spirit corpus, and interviews with Mercor and Micro1.
- AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models, MIT Technology Review on SimpleClosure’s deals, founder payouts and the legal gaps.
- Spirit Airlines wind-down plan calls for millions in bonus pay, Bloomberg Government on executive payments tied to asset sales.